The Call of the Canyon, Zane Grey [ereader for textbooks txt] 📗

pall rising high into the sky. It was a duststorm and it was sweeping down on the wings of that gale. Carley remembered that somewhere along this flat there was a log cabin which had before provided shelter for her and Flo when they were caught in a rainstorm. It seemed unlikely that she had passed by this cabin.

Resolutely she faced the gale and knew she had a task to find that refuge. If there had been a big rock or bushy cedar to offer shelter she would have welcomed it. But there was nothing. When the hard dusty gusts hit her, she found it absolutely necessary to shut her eyes. At intervals less windy she opened them, and rode on, peering through the yellow gloom for the cabin. Thus she got her eyes full of dust—an alkali dust that made them sting and smart. The fiercer puffs of wind carried pebbles large enough to hurt severely. Then the dust clogged her nose and sand got between her teeth. Added to these annoyances was a heat like a blast from a furnace. Carley perspired freely and that caked the dust on her face. She rode on, gradually growing more uncomfortable and miserable. Yet even then she did not utterly lose a sort of thrilling zest in being thrown upon her own responsibility. She could hate an obstacle, yet feel something of pride in holding her own against it.

Another mile of buffeting this increasing gale so exhausted Carley and wrought upon her nerves that she became nearly panic-stricken. It grew harder and harder not to turn back. At last she was about to give up when right at hand through the flying dust she espied the cabin. Riding behind it, she dismounted and tied the mustang to a post. Then she ran around to the door and entered.

What a welcome refuge! She was all right now, and when Glenn came along she would have added to her already considerable list another feat for which he would commend her. With aid of her handkerchief, and the tears that flowed so copiously, Carley presently freed her eyes of the blinding dust. But when she essayed to remove it from her face she discovered she would need a towel and soap and hot water.

The cabin appeared to be enveloped in a soft, swishing, hollow sound. It seeped and rustled. Then the sound lulled, only to rise again. Carley went to the door, relieved and glad to see that the duststorm was blowing by. The great sky-high pall of yellow had moved on to the north. Puffs of dust were whipping along the road, but no longer in one continuous cloud. In the west, low down the sun was sinking, a dull magenta in hue, quite weird and remarkable.

“I knew I’d get the jolt all right,” soliloquized Carley, wearily, as she walked to a rude couch of poles and sat down upon it. She had begun to cool off. And there, feeling dirty and tired, and slowly wearing to the old depression, she composed herself to wait.

Suddenly she heard the clip-clop of hoofs. “There! that’s Glenn,” she cried, gladly, and rising, she ran to the door.

She saw a big bay horse bearing a burly rider. He discovered her at the same instant, and pulled his horse.

“Ho! Ho! if it ain’t Pretty Eyes!” he called out, in gay, coarse voice.

Carley recognized the voice, and then the epithet, before her sight established the man as Haze Ruff. A singular stultifying shock passed over her.

“Wal, by all thet’s lucky!” he said, dismounting. “I knowed we’d meet some day. I can’t say I just laid fer you, but I kept my eyes open.”

Manifestly he knew she was alone, for he did not glance into the cabin.

“I’m waiting for—Glenn,” she said, with lips she tried to make stiff.

“Shore I reckoned thet,” he replied, genially. “But he won’t be along yet awhile.”

He spoke with a cheerful inflection of tone, as if the fact designated was one that would please her; and his swarthy, seamy face expanded into a good-humored, meaning smile. Then without any particular rudeness he pushed her back from the door, into the cabin, and stepped across the threshold.

“How dare—you!” cried Carley. A hot anger that stirred in her seemed to be beaten down and smothered by a cold shaking internal commotion, threatening collapse. This man loomed over her, huge, somehow monstrous in his brawny uncouth presence. And his knowing smile, and the hard, glinting twinkle of his light eyes, devilishly intelligent and keen, in no wise lessened the sheer brutal force of him physically. Sight of his bulk was enough to terrorize Carley.

“Me! Aw, I’m a darin’ hombre an’ a devil with the wimmin,” he said, with a guffaw.

Carley could not collect her wits. The instant of his pushing her back into the cabin and following her had shocked her and almost paralyzed her will. If she saw him now any the less fearful she could not so quickly rally her reason to any advantage.

“Let me out of here,” she demanded.

“Nope. I’m a-goin’ to make a little love to you,” he said, and he reached for her with great hairy hands.

Carley saw in them the strength that had so easily swung the sheep. She saw, too, that they were dirty, greasy hands. And they made her flesh creep.

“Glenn will kill—you,” she panted.

“What fer?” he queried, in real or pretended surprise. “Aw, I know wimmin. You’ll never tell him.”

“Yes, I will.”

“Wal, mebbe. I reckon you’re lyin’, Pretty Eyes,” he replied, with a grin. “Anyhow, I’ll take a chance.”

“I tell you—he’ll kill you,” repeated Carley, backing away until her weak knees came against the couch.

“What fer, I ask you?” he demanded.

“For this—this insult.”

“Huh! I’d like to know who’s insulted you. Can’t a man take an invitation to kiss an’ hug a girl—without insultin’ her?”

“Invitation! … Are you crazy?” queried Carley, bewildered.

“Nope, I’m not crazy, an’ I shore said invitation … . I meant thet white shimmy dress you wore the night of Flo’s party. Thet’s my invitation to get a little fresh with you, Pretty Eyes!”

Carley could only stare at him. His words seemed to have some peculiar, unanswerable power.

“Wal, if it wasn’t an invitation, what was it?” he asked, with another step that brought him within reach of her. He waited for her answer, which was not forthcoming.

“Wal, you’re gettin’ kinda pale around the gills,” he went on, derisively. “I reckoned you was a real sport… . Come here.”

He fastened one of his great hands in the front of her coat and gave her a pull. So powerful was it that Carley came hard against him, almost knocking her breathless. There he held her a moment and then put his other arm round her. It seemed to crush both breath and sense out of her. Suddenly limp, she sank strengthless. She seemed reeling in darkness. Then she felt herself thrust away from him with violence. She sank on the couch and her head and shoulders struck the wall.

“Say, if you’re a-goin’ to keel over like thet I pass,” declared Ruff, in disgust. “Can’t you Eastern wimmin stand nothin?”

Carley’s eyes opened and beheld this man in an attitude of supremely derisive protest.

“You look like a sick kitten,” he added. “When I get me a sweetheart or wife I want her to be a wild cat.”

His scorn and repudiation of her gave Carley intense relief. She sat up and endeavored to collect her shattered nerves. Ruff gazed down at her with great disapproval and even disappointment.

“Say, did you have some fool idee I was a-goin’ to kill you?” he queried, gruffly.

“I’m afraid—I did,” faltered Carley. Her relief was a release; it was so strange that it was gratefulness.

“Wal, I reckon I wouldn’t have hurt you. None of these flop-over Janes for me! … An’ I’ll give you a hunch, Pretty Eyes. You might have run acrost a fellar thet was no gentleman!”

Of all the amazing statements that had ever been made to Carley, this one seemed the most remarkable.

“What ‘d you wear thet onnatural white dress fer?” he demanded, as if he had a right to be her judge.

“Unnatural?” echoed Carley.

“Shore. Thet’s what I said. Any woman’s dress without top or bottom is onnatural. It’s not right. Why, you looked like—like”—here he floundered for adequate expression—“like one of the devil’s angels. An’ I want to hear why you wore it.”

“For the same reason I’d wear any dress,” she felt forced to reply.

“Pretty Eyes, thet’s a lie. An’ you know it’s a lie. You wore thet white dress to knock the daylights out of men. Only you ain’t honest enough to say so … . Even me or my kind! Even us, who ‘re dirt under your little feet. But all the same we’re men, an’ mebbe better men than you think. If you had to put that dress on, why didn’t you stay in your room? Naw, you had to come down an’ strut around an’ show off your beauty. An’ I ask you— if you’re a nice girl like Flo Hutter—what ‘d you wear it fer?”

Carley not only was mute; she felt rise and burn in her a singular shame and surprise.

“I’m only a sheep dipper,” went on Ruff, “but I ain’t no fool. A fellar doesn’t have to live East an’ wear swell clothes to have sense. Mebbe you’ll learn thet the West is bigger’n you think. A man’s a man East or West. But if your Eastern men stand for such dresses as thet white one they’d do well to come out West awhile, like your lover, Glenn Kilbourne. I’ve been rustlin’ round here ten years, an’ I never before seen a dress like yours—an’ I never heerd of a girl bein’ insulted, either. Mebbe you think I insulted you. Wal, I didn’t. Fer I reckon nothin’ could insult you in thet dress… . An’ my last hunch is this, Pretty Eyes. You’re not what a hombre like me calls either square or game. Adios.”

His bulky figure darkened the doorway, passed out, and the light of the sky streamed into the cabin again. Carley sat staring. She heard Ruff’s spurs tinkle, then the ring of steel on stirrup, a sodden leathery sound as he mounted, and after that a rapid pound of hoofs, quickly dying away.

He was gone. She had escaped something raw and violent. Dazedly she realized it, with unutterable relief. And she sat there slowly gathering the nervous force that had been shattered. Every word that he had uttered was stamped in startling characters upon her consciousness. But she was still under the deadening influence of shock. This raw experience was the worst the West had yet dealt her. It brought back former states of revulsion and formed them in one whole irrefutable and damning judgment that seemed to blot out the vaguely dawning and growing happy susceptibilities. It was, perhaps, just as well to have her mind reverted to realistic fact. The presence of Haze Ruff, the astounding truth of the contact with his huge sheep-defiled hands, had been profanation and degradation under which she sickened with fear and shame. Yet hovering back of her shame and rising anger seemed to be a pale, monstrous, and indefinable thought, insistent and accusing, with which she must sooner or later reckon. It might have been the voice of the new side of her nature, but at that moment of outraged womanhood, and of revolt against the West, she would not listen. It might, too, have been the still small voice of conscience. But decision of mind and energy coming to her then, she threw off the burden of emotion and perplexity, and forced herself into composure